Articles

Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.

LIVE REVIEW July 14, 2020

Festival International de Jazz de Montréal 2020

2020 Festival International de Jazz de Montréal Various Venues Montréal, Canada June 27-30, 2020 Above all else the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal is a spectacular ten-day event: with around 2 million visitors and 500 concerts on 20 stages, it is ranked as the world's largest jazz festival in the Guinness World Records. Its 2020 cancellation due to the pandemic was a huge disappointment to the many jazz fans who have ...

ALBUM REVIEW July 14, 2020

Zoöphyte: Signs Of Life

By Ian Patterson

A zoophyte is the ancient Greek term for an invertebrate animal resembling a plant. So, an odd name for a band, perhaps. Mythical zoophytes, like the plant that grew sheep as its fruit, were commonplace in Medieval herbals—tomes describing the culinary, toxic, hallucinatory, aromatic, and magical qualities of plants. These were, in less scientific times, attempts to explain the origin of exotic plants. So far so strange. It takes only one listen to Signs of Life, however, to understand the ...

ALBUM REVIEW July 14, 2020

Zara McFarlane: Songs Of An Unknown Tongue

By Chris May

It takes courage for a musician to depart from a successful recipe to the extent that the British singer and songwriter Zara McFarlane does on Songs of An Unknown Tongue. The disc is not a complete shift from the paradigm of her three previous albums, but it is a radical spin on it. First, what has changed. McFarlane's last album, Arise (Brownswood, 2017) was, like its predecessors, an acoustic set played by a band drawn from McFarlane's ...

RADIO July 14, 2020

Highlights of Jazz in the Late 2000s (2004 - 2010)

By Russell Perry

This is the 98th of 100 programs in the Jazz at 100 series. The programs have chronologically followed the history of recorded jazz and, as we approach the present, the question of historical perspective becomes relevant. Just how well can we predict what will endure? What will have lasting importance? We are in the midst of a five-program series featuring one selection per year, starting in 1990, in an attempt to forecast the answers to these questions. Our ...

ALBUM REVIEW July 14, 2020

Joshua Crumbly: Rise

By Geno Thackara

Joshua Crumbly and his bass have logged a good few miles learning from a respectable number of fellow players (Victor Bailey, Terence Blanchard, Kamasi Washington and more) in his fairly young career, and it shows--his debut may not be as wildly eclectic as it could have been with such a colorful history to build on, but then it's not specifically meant to be. Rise is more about portraying emotions and inner thoughts, and the variety of players and tones here ...

ALBUM REVIEW July 14, 2020

Anna Hogberg Attack: lena

By John Sharpe

It is a well known gambit to start an album with one of its strongest tracks. But it must have been a difficult choice for Swedish band leader and saxophonist Anna Högberg when programming her group Attack's second release. That she chose “Pappa Kom Hem," which opens with a sustained stentorian bellow from tenor saxophonist Elin Forkelid, leading to a cataclysmic free for all, announces that this is an uncompromising outfit. But the way the cut ends with the emergence ...

BUILDING A JAZZ LIBRARY July 13, 2020

Atlantic Records: More Giant Steps: An Alternative Top 20 Albums

By Chris May

Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun's Atlantic Records differs in one key respect from Prestige, Riverside, Impulse!, Strata-East and Flying Dutchman, the most prominent labels covered so far in this Building A Jazz Library series. Those labels' discographies consist almost exclusively of jazz. Atlantic had parallel interests in soul and rhythm-and-blues and, later, rock. This had consequences, as we shall see in a moment. Atlantic was founded in New York in 1947 by jazz and blues enthusiasts Ahmet Ertegun, ...